Fighting Conspiracist Witch-Hunts and Irrational Mob Panics

What Is Grey Faction?

Grey Faction is an initiative of The Satanic Temple which documents, exposes, and seeks to counter the past and current impacts of the Satanic Panic while aggressively seeking to bring to an end pseudoscientific mental health care practices that contribute to harmful conspiracist Satanic Panic delusions.

Beginning in 1980 and roughly dated to have ended around 1995, the modern witch-hunt known to sociologists as the “Satanic Panic” was marked by a temporary mainstream acceptance of absurd and irrational conspiracy theories related to Satanic Cult mind-control and Ritual Abuse. Countless lives were ruined as courts — influenced by pseudoscientist mental health “experts” — accepted “recovered memory” testimony, no more credible than “memories” similarly “recovered” for alleged victims of alien abduction or offered by believers in Past Life Regression. Fraud “occult crime” investigators offered testimony to the reality of a hidden Satanic threat that, in fact, never existed at all. Though such debunked and ludicrous notions don’t enjoy the same uncritical daytime talk-show fascination they held in the 1980s, organizations like the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) still work to impress Satanic Panic delusions into the minds of mental health consumers and the public at large. Occult Crime investigators, conspiracists, hack reporters, and opportunistic cons tirelessly work to revive their cherished witch-hunt in collusion with a failed mental health care system that never prohibited nor properly censured Recovered Memory Therapies or the delusional and/or exploitative licensed mental health professionals who still use these techniques to draw forth confabulatory false confessions from their clientele. Grey Faction is a sub-organization of The Satanic Temple dedicated to combating irrational conspiracy theory-based moral panics, modern witch-hunts, and the discredited therapeutic practices that still haunt us from beyond the formally recognized Satanic Panic era.

“And this is where today’s Western, somewhat secularized, witch-hunters currently reside: among psychology’s pseudoscientific fringe; feeding delusion to the mentally vulnerable behind the protection of therapist-client privilege, and under the guise trauma therapy. While they revel in their disturbed pornographic fantasies of child-rape and extreme abuse, they proclaim their critics to be demented defenders of pedophilic assault. They co-opt the narrative of victim’s rights to conceal their absurd conspiracy theories from criticism and scrutiny. To question the validity of DID, or even the reality of a Satanic conspiracy, is — according to this defensive ploy — to question the very existence of child abuse itself. In this way, actual victims of abuse are used as human shields to defend our modern inquisitors as they engage in the most outrageous and under-investigated mental health scandal of our time.” (Full article)

Who are the ISSTD?

Grey Faction brochure distributed at the 2017 annual conference for the International Society for the Study of Trauma & Dissociation (ISSTD) in Washington, DC

“The facts are these: an 8-year old autistic boy was diagnosed with a debunked psychiatric disorder. The diagnosis was arrived at by discredited methods. The professional pseudoscientific assumptions surrounding the boy’s “treatment” likely contributed to paranoid delusions in his openly disturbed mother, who ultimately killed the boy in order to spare him from the horrors of a nonexistent threat. While the boy’s mother now serves a prison term for her crime, the worse-than-incompetent “professionals” who not only failed to prevent her from committing the murder, but may have actively fed the paranoid delusions that acted as her rationale for the deed, remain unapologetic and without censure. It is my contention that proper professional mental health intervention may well have prevented this woman from murdering her son. The fact that her filicidal delusions could be reinforced by mental health professionals should be cause for outrage and reform.” (Full article)

“Throughout the 80s and 90s there was a moral panic against Satanic Cults that turned out to be nothing more than a delusion-fueled conspiracy theory. As with the alien abduction phenomenon, therapists were compelling their clients to confabulate false memories under hypnosis. While we now know that this process of creating false memories can be very damaging to individuals and has never been known to draw forth accurate recall, we find therapists still endorsing this practice and even still continuing to spread conspiracy theories related to Satanic cults […] The Grey Faction seeks to expose therapeutic pseudoscience and bring an end to its practice.”— Sarah Ponto Rivera